My friend Andrei decided to repair an old stove at his khutor (farm). It had some cracks and was emitting a lot of smoke. He was advised to seek the assistance of a stove-maker, who served the general area. This stove-maker lived on the other bank of the river, in a small village some six kilometers from Andrei's place. For a month Andrei tried to persuade him to come for a month. Finally, he managed to awake his interest and brought him to his khutor. For the next month, during which time this craftsman was laying bricks for the stove, Andrei had to drive him back and forth. In the end Andrei asked him to attach an old German door to the stove to make it easier to sweep the chimney. Some time later the stove-maker announced that the stove was ready. Inspecting the stove, the client discovered that the door was missing. The stove-maker explained that he hadn't fixed the door. Rather, he had simply loosened two bricks and put them forward a bit from the wall, so that the owner of the stove could easily take them out of the wall whenever it was necessary. Andrey almost quarreled with this repairman. He insisted on fixing the door and finally got it, but the stove-maker said that he had always been doing this "brick trick" and all his clients were satisfied.

Incredibly, the Germans had an entire assembly line for making stoves: there was a metal procurer, a blacksmith to forge the door, a stove-maker to assemble it, and a stove owner to order and use this door. We don't need all of this in our macrocosm.

A university colleague of mine, to whom I had told this story, responded unexpectedly. "I'm bored stiff by knocking out these bricks every year in order to sweep the chimney. My stove was built after the War, you know."

These stove stories aroused my interest. I thumbed through some post-war newspapers and documents and found an entire world of fuel energy: winter preparations, getting roofs ready for winter, glazing stairwell windows, coal storage, chimney sweeping, et cetera. Municipalities announced that the migrants had ordered over 1200 stoves for their new houses.

So, if you have stove-heating, these instructions from 1947 may be of help:

Is your stove ready for winter season?

Remember, your stove WILL NOT FUNCTION properly if: the distances between the walls and the chimney, furnace bridges and wooden walls, and ceilings and shingles are too small, if there are cracks in the stove walls, chimneys, or furnace bridges; and if the fire-chamber doors are not firmly secured.

The stove WILL FUNCTION and may be used IF the stove and chimney walls inside the house and in the attic are covered in clay and whitewashed, the furnace extension is covered with a 50 x 70 cm metal sheet and the door is firmly secured. The space between the stove internal surface and chimney and wooden parts of the house (partitions, floors) should not be less than 40 cm. The roofing shingles should be placed 12cm from the chimney surface.